Funny Girls

Reel Affirmations 2009

IF YOU’RE LOOKING to find some belly laughs at the festival, traipse on down to Funny Girls for some shorts that will have you giggling and guffawing.

Four of the program’s funniest pieces revolved around relationships — namely courting and keeping a lover. In Falling for Caroline (), Darcy meets her dream girl, Caroline, at the video store and embarks on a goofily romantic quest the culminates in slapstick evening of baked chicken, Tipping the Velvet and a malfunctioning studded bra. Sharply written and winningly performed.

For her Happy Birthday (), very femme Abigail wants to invert the roles with her super butch girlfriend, Jack. A bit overly earnest in its exploration of gender and sex roles, the short still nails a series of one-liners and visual jokes, including Abigail’s unskilled attempts to slip into a strap-on. Buttery Top () takes on similar themes during the courtship phase, when a femme asks her butch date to bring some bread for their elegant pasta dinner — and ends up receiving a sliced, white loaf in a plastic bag. Horrors!

Dancing to Happiness (Tanz ins Gluck) () is a sweet Swiss fairy tale where single mother Anna works as an office building cleaning lady and dreams of dancing. Fate puts her in a two-person salsa class with an executive from her building, the brittle Helen. Lightly written and deftly performed, Dancing is a pure charmer.

Menopausal Gals Gone Wild () purports to sell sexy videos of hot sweaty gals — in their fifties. A cavalcade of boobies and strategically placed black bars make this late-night information parody a mostly spot-on winner, even if a tad too long. Queerer than Thou () turns an LGBTQQIA — it’s possible there were more letters in that, but I lost count — dinner into a competition for authentic queerness that lands some nice jabs on the intricacies of self identification, but peters out a bit at the end.

A therapist visits The Thorny Rose () dominatrix service in order to work on her own issues; she and her dom both get more than they bargained for. Funny, with a weird three-point turn into the super-serious. Your Turn () turns an interminable online checkers match between two middle aged women into a fabulous drag king performance. Lost and Found () is a short tale of love found, lost and possibly found again — in an apartment building’s laundry room.

Less successful but still engaging is You Are a Lesbian Vampire (), which overcomes some stilted narration to deliver some incisive advice to lesbian vampires, including thinking twice before turning your new girlfriend into an immortal, because when you break up she’s going to hang around forever.

Les Lapins (The Girl Bunnies) () cutely presents two animated pink bunnies in love, but doesn’t get much deeper than a film school project. Worst Case Scenario Femme Edition () lands some lines as a femme etiquette primer, but simply suffers from not being funny enough. And Weimar House () lets its good intentions on marriage equality turn a potentially funny concept into a flat mélange of stereotypes, both gay and straight, we’ve all seen before.